Sports has a wide range of players, levels, supporters, and fans. Players may range from beginners (e.g., 4 years old and higher) to professionals. The levels of sports teams may range from beginners through professionals. Supporters of sports teams and players may include family members, assistants, volunteers, former players, and coaches. Fans may include family members and people who like the sport, team, or team members.
Coaches and players often find reviewing practice and game video footage useful in helping players and teams improve their performance. In the case of an individual player, video footage of the individual player's actions is beneficial to view so that the individual player can see what he or she did well and not so well.
With low-funded teams (e.g., non-professional teams), video editors who can review video footage to identify specific segments related to specific players is generally not an option due to cost. Moreover, even if a video editor is willing to work at no or low cost, the amount of time needed to create video segments for specific players is not always feasible due to games being long and manually reviewing the footage to identify the specific players in specific video segments is difficult, especially when there are multiple players who enter and exit video scenes.
Beyond the obvious use of the video footage to assist players and coaches in improving skills and teamwork, families and friends of a player often like to view the player during a game without having to watch or fast forward through an entire game, but rather be able to see the player when he or she is “in action.” Additionally, video scrapbooks or gifts for family, such as grandparents who live far away, are often desired, but tend to be costly due to tedious editing processes that currently exist. Moreover, for gifted athletes who want to provide video clips to prospective colleges or professional teams, or scouts of professional teams looking for gifted athletes, creation of quality video segments that meet their respective needs is a time consuming process.
For amateur sports, there is a desire to view the players from multiple angles and from unique angles (e.g., from goal viewpoint, overhead, sidelines, home team side, away team side). However, the availability of collecting such video footage is not possible for a variety of reasons, and establishing a coordinated control structure for such a video production is generally not financially possible.
Hence, there is a need for a system and process (i) to expedite identification of players on sports teams in video footage, (ii) to capture video footage of sport teams from multiple mobile recording devices, possibly disparate recording devices, and from different angles, and (iii) to synthesize and organize video footage, optionally in real-time, that is cost effective.